Fauvism
The sky could be green, a face could be red: these painters freed color from what the eye reports and turned it into an instrument of feeling. At the 1905 Salon d'Automne, the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a classical-style sculpture standing among their canvases and wrote Donatello among the wild beasts. That is where fauves, wild beasts, comes from, and it was no compliment. The movement itself lasted only a short while, but its freedom shaped nearly every painting that came after. Incidentally, Vauxcelles did it again three years later. In 1908 he said a Braque reduced everything to cubes, and named Cubism (see Cubism). The two most famous style names of the twentieth century were both made by the same critic, while disparaging them. And this band has a sequel. In 1937 Nazi Germany published a list of the styles it denounced as degenerate art, and Fauvism was on it. Five years of freeing colour from what the eye reports, denounced by a state thirty-two years later. Free colour, it seems, carries more meaning than you would think.